Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    True Ladies and Proper Gentlemen: Victorian Etiquette for Modern-Day Mothers and Fathers, Husbands and Wives, Boys and Girls, Teachers and Students, and More
    True Ladies and Proper Gentlemen: Victorian Etiquette for Modern-Day Mothers and Fathers, Husbands and Wives, Boys and Girls, Teachers and Students, and More
    True Ladies and Proper Gentlemen: Victorian Etiquette for Modern-Day Mothers and Fathers, Husbands and Wives, Boys and Girls, Teachers and Students, and More
    Ebook224 pages1 hour

    True Ladies and Proper Gentlemen: Victorian Etiquette for Modern-Day Mothers and Fathers, Husbands and Wives, Boys and Girls, Teachers and Students, and More

    By Sarah A. Chrisman

    3/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Regardless of time period, some things hold true: kindness is timeless.

    Invasion of privacy; divorce; relationship issues; encounters between people from different places and cultures; new technologies developed at dizzying speeds . . . the hectic pace of life in the late nineteenth century could make the mind reel.

    Wait a minutethe nineteenth century?

    Many of the issues people faced in the 1880s and ’90s surprisingly remain problems in today’s modern world, so why not take a peek at some Victorian advice about negotiating life’s dizzying twists and turns? Gathered from period magazines and Hill’s Manual of Social and Business Forms, a book on social conduct originally published in 1891, this volume provides timeless guidance for a myriad of situations, including:

    The husband’s duty: Give your wife every advantage that it is possible to bestow.
    Suggestions about shopping: Purchasers should, as far as possible, patronize the merchants of their own town. (Buy local!)
    Suggestions for travel: Having paid for one ticket, you are entitled to only one seat. It shows selfishness to deposit a large amount of baggage in the surrounding seats and occupy three or four.
    Unclassified laws of etiquette: Never leave home with unkind words.

    This advice is accompanied by watercolors and illustrations throughout. Though these are tips originate from nineteenth-century ideas, you’ll find that they certainly do still apply.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateMay 19, 2015
    ISBN9781634500005
    True Ladies and Proper Gentlemen: Victorian Etiquette for Modern-Day Mothers and Fathers, Husbands and Wives, Boys and Girls, Teachers and Students, and More

    Read more from Sarah A. Chrisman

    Related to True Ladies and Proper Gentlemen

    Related ebooks

    YA Social Themes For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Taking It On The Chin

      Mar 3, 2021

      Taking It On The Chin
      4 min read

    • Article

      Hopeful Expressions for a New Year

      Nov 23, 2021

      It wasn’t until a few months ago that I decided to tackle the fast-approaching New Year from a different angle: being kinder to myself. Recently, I compiled a vision board with multiple words and phrases that serve as my goals. It was worthwhile flip

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Country House weekend

      Aug 13, 2020

      A Country House weekend
      6 min read

    • Article

      Staying Home In Style

      Nov 12, 2020

      Staying Home In Style
      3 min read

    • Article

      Tea Events Calendar

      Dec 7, 2021

      Afternoon Tea Noon to 2:00 p.m. Cultivate Taste Tea Salon Green Bay, Wisconsin Spend a Sunday in January relaxing and gathering with friends and family over tea and food, dressed in something special for a special occasion. Enjoy a proper teatime and

      2 min read

    • Article

      Tailoring The Classics

      May 7, 2020

      Fashion plays a big part in writing, as it does in so many walks of life. I mean literary fashion, by the way – if writing success depended on having elegant dress sense, I’d have abandoned hope long ago. The harsh reality is that if the type of stor

      6 min read

    • Article

      Writing Is Thinking: Martha Anne Toll in Conversation with Ed Simon

      Jul 28, 2021

      Writers write, that's what we do—that's what we need to do. Writing is how I organize my experience and make sense of the world; in some ways writing is itself synonymous with thinking for me. The post Writing Is Thinking: Martha Anne Toll in Convers

      9 min read

    • Article

      I’d Like to Thank the Academy

      Oct 15, 2021

      Many of my students, and even some younger colleagues, think—assume—that creative nonfiction is just part of the literary ecosystem; it’s always been around, like fiction or poetry. In many ways, of course, they are right: the kind of writing that is

      10 min read

    • Article

      A Year in (Canadian) Reading: Claire Cameron

      Dec 9, 2017

      I was on book tour for much of the year. And when I tour, I read. I’m not sure how many books I got through exactly, but I read about quantum gravity, a few different translations of Beowulf, microbiology, and cave art. I read Elon Musk’s biogr

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Right Royal Success

      Jul 7, 2022

      A Right Royal Success
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Right Royal Success

      Jul 7, 2022

      A Right Royal Success
      3 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Jan 9, 2023

      As a writer and musician, I’m always interested in others’ approach to the creative process. When that someone is legendary music producer Rick Rubin, I’m even more interested. Rubin’s decades-long career has seen him produce a wildly eclectic mix of

      6 min read

    • Article

      Independent Bookstore as Essential Political Act

      Mar 28, 2017

      I was recently in San Francisco’s Mission District with an hour to kill. In general I hate having to kill time—I never know what to do—and to make things worse I was tired and just wanted to be home with a good book. So I wandered along, trying to fi

      7 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Mar 22, 2021

      by Tangaroa Walker Penguin — $38 Don’t read this book — or at least its introduction — if you don’t think you’ll be entertained by the killing of a cow when a car hits one and farcical complications ensue. As the title of that section indicates, “Far

      5 min read

    • Article

      Star Letter

      Dec 1, 2022

      Star Letter
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Greg Afinogenov

      Dec 4, 2020

      This year was a lesson both in feeling the anchor’s immobile presence and its unmooredness. It will be here next year, if, perhaps, a bit more eroded. The post A Year in Reading: Greg Afinogenov appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for True Ladies and Proper Gentlemen

    3/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      True Ladies and Proper Gentlemen - Sarah A. Chrisman

      INTRODUCTION

      I was grateful—although admittedly a bit intimidated—when my husband gave me a leather-bound antique book with the rather formidable title, Hill’s Manual of Social and Business Forms: A Guide to Correct Writing With Approved Methods in Speaking and Acting in the Various Relations of Life, Embracing Instruction and Examples in Penmanship, Spelling, Use of Capital Letters, Punctuation, Composition, Writing for the Press, Proof-Reading, Epistolary Correspondence, Notes of Invitation, Cards, Commercial Forms, Legal Business Forms, Family Records, Synonyms, Short-Hand Writing, Duties of Secretaries, Parliamentary Rules, Sign-Writing Epitaphs, The Laws of Etiquette, Book-Keeping, Valuable Tables of Reference, Writing Poetry, Etc., Etc.

      This book with a title of biblical length weighed five and a half pounds, had a measure from top to bottom equal to the length of my forearm, and was considerably thicker than our parlor door. My husband had acquired it for me in response to a fervently expressed desire on my part: I wanted a guide for knowing the truly Victorian response to life’s daily challenges. This book certainly was that!

      Targeted at a middle-class American audience, Hill’s Manual . . . explained the intricacies of everything from how to describe a quit-claim deed for a mine (page 234) to how to give a speech upon being nominated for political office (page 465). This promiscuous array of advice covered such a wide range of human interactions that anyone from a social-climbing rail-splitter to an immigrant freshly landed at Ellis Island was bound to find something useful in the book’s crimson-edged pages. The book was originally published in 1873, and by the time our particular volume was printed eighteen years later, the publishers could already boast sales of 345,000. When it appeared in the 1897 Sears & Roebuck catalog for $1.75, Hill’s Manual was one of the top listings in the S & R book department—appearing several pages before the bibles.

      In America of the late nineteenth century, individuals from a remarkable diversity of cultural and economic backgrounds were encountering new people and novel situations at a rate that seemed mind-boggling. Class status was a more malleable idea than it had ever been before—after all, both President Lincoln and President Garfield had been born in log cabins. In an era when it seemed a very definite possibility that the person who served as a waiter in a fine restaurant one day might well be an honored guest at the same table a week later, one of the most important things people could learn was the right way to treat each other.

      The sections of Hill’s Manual . . . I found most delightful (and most timeless) were the ones regarding etiquette—or, as the esteemed Mr. Hill put it: What to Say and How to Do. There is a finite limit to the number of people who can find scintillating reading material in the instructions for writing a Letter of Substitution Appended to Power of Attorney (page 269). But it seems no loving couple could fail to be touched by the etiquette between husbands and wives—Never neglect the other, for all the world beside, and Let the angry word be answered only with a kiss. Turning to the suggestions about shopping, I found the first item on the list to be: Purchasers should, as far as possible, patronize the merchants of their own town. (Shop local!) Every section on manners conveyed advice that has remained surprisingly current—even after the passage of more than a century.

      My husband and I are both incessant readers, and as I explored other antique books and magazines from the nineteenth century, I found countless ways the situations described in them corresponded to the etiquette I was learning from Hill’s Manual . . .—and still more underscoring of parallels with the modern world. The Art of Travel was written by Elizabeth Bisland just a few years after her 1889 race around the world against fellow reporter Nellie Bly—both of them rushing to beat the eighty-day record of Jules Verne’s fictitious Phineas Fogg character. Her humorous commentary on the behavior of customs officials seems very familiar to anyone who has passed through security in a twenty-first century airport. Similarly, the first time I read the hilarious piece Modern Improvements, about a fictitious country bumpkin’s first encounter with a telephone, through my laughter I had a strong sensation of deja vu as I recalled the first time I had seen someone chatting with a blue-tooth device and, like the grammatically challenged deacon of Belle C. Greene’s story, felt certain I was witnessing the ravings of a madman. Our modern challenges and encounters are still echoing those of our nineteenth-century predecessors, and their advice on dealing with troublesome situations has a lot to teach us about our own problems.

      There are reasons behind all laws of etiquette. Sometimes these reasons are obscure, but more often they become obvious if we only stop to think about them. For example: Never use your own knife when cutting butter. Always use a knife assigned to that purpose.¹ Why? Because using your own knife in the communal butter dish smears around the crumbs of everything else you’ve been eating. (Besides the likelihood that your neighbors won’t appreciate sharing the contents of your mouth in quite so intimate a fashion, crumbs shorten the butter’s shelf-life.) Throughout all of our quotidian travails, manners keep the crumbs out of life’s butter.

      Some readers might be surprised to find advice from the nineteenth century about the proper way to answer an I Saw You ad in a newspaper²; or to read a story about how a woman responded to critics who said she was throwing away her college education by having a family³—but again, these are reminders that some issues are older than we might at first consider them.

      The volume you are now holding in your hands contains what I feel to be the best of the Hill’s Manual . . .—its portions with the most abiding relevance to society. Weight-lifters might not find this version to be quite as helpful in building muscle mass as the original (and there have been a few very minor updates of punctuation to aid in legibility), but the advice contained within is just as useful as the antique tome. To put all this advice in context, it has been interspersed with articles and stories from its own time period.

      Readers familiar with antique publications might notice a charming convention that has been retained in this volume—that of separating the colored artwork as a unique portion of the work. In the 1800s, it was a common practice to print all black-and-white materials (text as well as graphics) together as the main section of a magazine and put all the color plates together at the back. Colored plates illustrating fashions would be accompanied by reference numbers to the articles describing them, but other colored artwork would include little or no text beyond a title (if that). Women would often cut these colored pictures out of their monthly magazines and use them as decor pieces or inexpensive artwork around their home, so they specifically didn’t want text detracting from the pictures. In a sweet homage to this tradition, the publishers have borrowed this formatting convention and printed the colored illustrations corresponding to the beauty advice separately, as a beautiful insert.

      When I came across the story The Story of An Old Letter in a brittle, antique copy of Peterson’s Magazine, I knew I had found not only a lovely accompaniment to the guidance about letter writing, but a charming way to open the book. I think we have all written missives of various sorts we regretted sending, and this fanciful story not only speaks to the universality of that particular theme but also offers a gentle segue into the idea of traveling through time via the conduit of written words—and contemplating what those words have to teach us.

      Happy reading!

      —S. C.

      ¹ Hill’s Manual of Social and Business Forms. . .

      ² An Advertisement in a Morning Paper

      ³ My Step-Children: An Echo From the Halls of Vassar College

      Sweethearts, Old and New

      The Story of an Old Letter (Fiction)
      Advice on Writing Love Letters, Answering Personal Ads, Courtship, and Marriage
      Etiquette of Courtship
      Etiquette between Husbands and Wives
      The Wife’s Duty
      The Husband’s Duty
      Betsey and I Are Out
      How Betsey and I Made Up

      The Story of an Old Letter

      By Olivia Lovell Wilson
      (Fiction)

      Part I. THE LETTER

      It was a quaint old desk, with its numberless little drawers promising mystery, and the brass knobs that caught the firelight and winked and twinkled back at the cheery blaze. A jolly inspiriting old piece of furniture, it had never grown dim in its polished oak, with all the years that had passed over it since Rosemary Alden’s grandmother sat before it, writing her epistles.

      But quite in contrast to its jovial smile at the wood-fire was Rose Alden’s countenance today, as she sat, her chin upon her plump little hand, discontent making a furrow in her smooth brow.

      Her pen lay across a finished letter, and she knew her words had been cold and hard as the steel pen she had used.

      She was not pleased with herself or the world, and least of all with the person to whom this letter was to bring gloom and despair.

      She had tried to forgive him, she thought, and yet such careless neglect before marriage, when he should not have divided a minute into a thousand parts, and break the thousandth part of a minute in the affairs of love! What did it bode for her future?

      So she said a few bitter words, and before he could explain or protest, conventionality had stepped between and they were forced to remain in mute discomfort through a long dinner given for their express honor as the happy betrothed.

      He had written, the next day, too anxious to wait until they met; and pretty Rose, before her grandmother’s desk, had just penned her cruel answer.

      Sitting there in gloomy meditation, the maiden was so like a portrait on the wall that many people believed it

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1